Schröder the Saviour makes a comeback

Michael Woodhead in Frankfurt reports that the German chancellor is striking a chord with voters

FACING the television camera alone with no props and a background of unadorned white, Gerhard Schröder has been doing his bunker pitch to keep himself in power as Germany’s chancellor and “Saviour of the Nation”.

Fighting on the home front has proved a highly successful tactic. Once seen as the “business-friendly chancellor”, he is now the defender of Germany’s treasured social-market economy and slayer of global dragons and ravenous free-market “locusts” — namely foreign companies bent on enslaving the citizenry in the chains of unemployment to benefit shareholders.

Nobody should be surprised at the Schröder comeback.

The conservative opposition may have overplayed its hand, believing Germans were up for Thatcherite-style reforms. Are voters really prepared to accept a two percentage point increase in Vat and the abolition of a raft of tax allowances? Or are they waking up to the fact that the conservative leader Angela Merkel is offering exactly what